Dr. David Eagleman

And it was pretty good at telling me what to do next.

Yeah.

Neosensory, I actually sold six months ago, so I don't have it anymore.

So I just got really interested in this topic about pushing information into the brain via unusual sensory channels.

So, for example, as you referenced, I built a wristband that captures sound and turns sound into patterns of vibration on the skin.

This is for people who are deaf.

And deaf people could learn how to hear that way.

Why?

Because this is the same thing that your inner ear, your cochlea does.

It's just capturing vibrations on the eardrum and breaking that up into different frequencies, shipping that off to the brain in terms of spikes, just these voltage spikes along nerves.

We're doing the same thing except we're pushing it in through the skin, it goes up the spinal cord to a different part of the brain, but the brain can figure that out.

How?

Because it's doing correlations.

It sees somebody's mouth move, it's feeling the sound, and it figures out how to hear that way.

Now, this idea of sensory substitution,

I, you know, I wish I'd invented that, but it actually has a long history.

And the more I research, I found out it goes back to the 1800s when people first started asking, hey, can you push information into the brain in a weird way?

So the very first one was in 1880s.

They had a little camera lens that would just detect light and dark and it would get translated into a buzzing on your forehead.

And for people who were blind, they could tell, you know, okay, well, there's a wall over here and then there's an opening over here and so on.